Um casa toda minha: um estudo da tradução brasileira de The House on Mango Street

Abstract

This investigation, following a qualitative approach through a bibliographical and exploratory-interpretive research, intends to investigate the Brazilian translation of The House on Mango Street, by Mexican American author Sandra Cisneros, translated by Brazilian writer and translator Natalia Borges Polesso, under the name A casa na Rua Mango, trying to answer the following question: how can the translation choices of the salient features of The House on Mango Street be characterized? In order to achieve this aim, the following objectives were proposed: (i) Identify the salient features in The House on Mango Street; (ii) Describe the strategies employed by the translator regarding these elements; (iii) Assess what is preserved and what is lost in the use of these strategies in A casa na Rua Mango. The theoretical framework is based on the essays by Rabassa (1989), Paz (2009), Dryden (1992), on considerations about translation, and on the work of Baker (2018) on translation strategies. The data collected point to three salient features in the book, namely, the marks of orality and/or colloquiality, translanguaging, and cultural aspects. The results show that the translation strategies used in A casa na Rua Mango were the following: use of a more general/less expressive word; paraphrase with related word; paraphrase without related word; use of idiomatic expression of similar meaning and dissimilar form; compensation; cultural replacement; mirroring; adaptation; and conservation. The results also indicate that in some cases the salient features of the work were preserved and in others they were lost.